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Global Warming Alert: Around 50 ships stuck in Baltic Sea ice
 More conclusive evidence of Global Warming...STOCKHOLM -- Around 50 ships, including large ferries carrying thousands, were stuck in the ice in the Baltic Sea Thursday and many were not likely to be freed for hours, Swedish maritime authorities said. What is this..."ice" you speak of? "Around 50 commercial vessels are waiting for help from ice breakers (and) we have had as many as six large passenger ferries stuck, but have managed to free two of them," Johny Lindvall of the Swedish Maritime Administration's ice breaker unit told AFP. He said all the six ferries besides one were shuttling passengers between Sweden and Finland, while the Regal Star ferry, which had been stuck since midnight (2300 GMT Wednesday) -- had been on its way to Estonia. Sweden's TT news agency first reported that the two largest ferries, the Isabella and the Amorella, were in total carrying 2,630 passengers, but later revised the number to 1,841. What, did 800 of them get out and walk? The Isabella has been freed, while the Amorella and the Regal Star were among the ferries that are still stuck, Lindvall said. Viking Line head Jan Kaarstroem told TT that his company's ferries were well equipped to handle ice and that all the passengers were safe. I'll translate: The bar is...open. Good thing the polar bears are extinct, or this would be their fantasy buffet line. Two ice breakers are in the area where the ferries are stuck, while a third is on its way after helping commercial vessels further north in the Bay of Bothnia, Lindvall said. That ice breaker "will not get there until midnight at the earliest, so they'll be stuck there until tomorrow morning at least", he said. Many of the commercial vessels had got stuck in the narrow Bay of Bothnia, where the ice is thicker, and around the autonomous Aaland islands. All the ferries meanwhile had run into trouble just outside the Stockholm archipelago made up of more than 20,000 islands, Lindvall said. "They got caught outside the archipelago, where there is moving ice. It's hard to navigate," he said, adding that he had not seen a situation with so many ships stuck at once since the mid-1980s. Back when "Global Cooling" was what the cool kids all believed in... Sweden has suffered an unusually harsh winter this year, with temperatures across the country almost continuously lying well below freezing since December. And with gusting, freezing winds whipping the Baltic over the past week, it was easy for ships to get stuck, Lindvall said. Geez, really cold in Sweden in winter. Can ya beat that? The large ferries are equipped to break their way through the thin layers of ice that often cover parts of the Baltic they traffic. That is perhaps why a number of them decided to ignore a warning the Swedish Maritime Administration had issued this week, according to Ulf Gullne, also of the administration's ice breaker unit. The passengers forced us to leave. They didn't want to get caught in the floods when the ice caps melted... "The problem is that these big ferries think they can handle the ice. They have extremely powerful engines, but in this case the ice was simply too difficult for them," he told Swedish public radio. But Viking Line head Kaarstroem told TT the Amorella and the Isabella had already left port when the ice warning came. And we read Al Gore's op/ed in the Times last week and figured "no problem"... Posted by: tu3031 2010-03-05 |
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